Unfaltering
by elegate1
Summary: They find themselves in a land far away and so close to home at the same time, and their reunion takes after the sole truth of their lives: Unexpectedness.


More League cause fuck yeah, Taliyah.

* * *

Shurima was hot. Shurima was _really hot_.

Shurima was _on fire_.

 _Vekaura_ , more accurately, was on fire.

A city built on foundations of _history_ , vast and imposing as no city he had seen in his travels before. Not even _Noxus Prime_ , with impossibly high towers of cold, gray stone that loomed over its citizens like jail-wardens watching over their prisoners. Not even _Piltover_ , which outshined the sun's might in the darkest of nights and in the brightest of days. _Nothing_ he'd ever seen was as impressive as _Vekaura_ , the city of the stones that whispered tales of old.

And it was in ruins. And on fire.

Yasuo was one with the wind as he _ran_ , so fast in his wake that everything was little more than a blur in his vision. His legs were a gust and his breath was the wild winds of a _Bilgewater_ maelstrom.

He hadn't been informed of this, _at all_ , when he asked a gentle enough woman named _Shamara_ for the whereabouts of his little sparrow. He'd expected a more fulfilling answer given that she had had his blade to her throat. He'd have to pay her a visit later, silk traders were _awfully easy_ to find.

He just stepped out of a war to walk right into another one – the man chided himself _severely_ in the depths of his subconscious. But none of that mattered now.

What mattered was that he _had_ to make sure she was okay.

Stone-blocks the size of _Ionian palaces_ littered the streets like corpses felled in battle, casting huge shadows over the cold bodies of men that had, in fact, been felled in battle, by forces he did not want to meddle with. He sped across a few gatherings of survivors that had ventured with great audacity into the open streetways to loot the after-spoils of the carnage for food and tools to defend themselves. They didn't get in his way, and so he didn't get in theirs. They were irrelevant; _everything_ but one thing was irrelevant.

It didn't take him much longer to find trouble. And, coincidentally, _her_.

It was the rumbling sound, similar to that of an avalanche descending in a furious charge to sweep away the world of men, what made him stop in his tracks, about ten paces away from breaking into what had to be a sort of central plaza. He stopped, because asides from natural disasters, he only knew of _one_ source that could emit such an ominous noise. He blinked and he was no longer about to enter the plaza but just a bit off from its central area, stalking the scenery from behind a boulder of granite. And that's when he saw it.

They were more than twenty, armed with sharp scimitars that shimmered under the incessant sunlight, and wearing garments that left little to no work for his vast imagination to deduce that they were _bandits_. In the middle of the plaza, surrounded by the evil-doers, was a flock of a few cowering citizens, who seemed to be trying their very best not to soil their weather-worn pants. But they were not dead and robbed yet (yes, in that order), because between them and the bandits someone had cut up an imaginary swath of protection. Which was not really imaginary, as two circular walls of stone had risen to the sides of the girl whose thick eyebrows seemed to grow bigger every day, followed closely behind by her bravery, apparently.

And her beauty, but Yasuo knew it was not the time for those wandering thoughts.

Taliyah looked very different from the girl plagued by a dozen insecurities that had saved him from an avalanche some time ago.

She exuded determination, and who wouldn't with a scowl _that_ vicious?

She had her feet planted firmly in the ground. She _owned_ the ground. She was trying to advise them, to _warn_ them, that the plaza was not their battleground. It was _hers_.

Yasuo pondered his options.

He could stroll up to her to say hello, cutting through a few scoundrels before they could even turn their little heads at his entrance.

 _Or_.

Yasuo was nothing if not a ' _hard-way_ ' sort of teacher. He wasn't about to fight his student's battles when he knew they could handle themselves well enough. To be honest, even the simplest of simpletons that polluted the high-chairs of the _Demacian Court_ could see that his student could handle herself _well enough_. He scanned his surroundings for a shaded place and he went ahead to rest his back against a fallen column, invoking a fresh breeze to sweep along the asphyxiating dry air around him and admiring the perfect view of the battle that was about to happen.

Taliyah was _really_ tired of dealing with cocky scavengers. She had thought, _hoped_ really, that their last incursion would be their last.

As she had thought of the one before it, and the one before that one. At first she was angry, now she was… _tired_.

" _I am in no mood to kick your sorry excuses for Shuriman asses, gentlemen. I have three encampments to watch over besides this one; I have to bring some medicine to a girl that was stung by a poisonous scorpion; I have to patrol the city-border for more of you and your friends and I haven't slept in two whole days. If you would be so kind as to turn around and leave the city I would be very grateful and I won't chase you down…_ " she tried her wordier approach first – she always did, and they always laughed.

This time was no exception.

The man with the shiniest ornaments dangling from his neck shouted his retort back at her in shuriman, littering his words with colorful insults that she was _not_ going to translate. It was something along the –predictable enough – lines of " _A little girl like you can't do anything against the lot of brawny, big and mean men that we are_ ". Taliyah was just _so tired_ of hearing the same words over and over from each and every scavenging warmonger that had tried to ransack the refugee-encampments in the last days.

But this one added a little more spice to his words, because he brought her _age_ to the board, and frankly that was _rude_.

At least for most people – for Taliyah it was something a little bit more along the lines of _blasphemous_. He was _not_ getting on her _good side_ that way _._

Tired of indulging their antics, she decided to get it over with. Two blinks was all it took her to jumpstart the action; one to connect with the bedrock under the street and the other to weave it. Two blinks, to open a pit under the men flaking " _Mister Sparkleneck_ " to his left, deep enough to trap them but not quite as deep to make the fall deadly. She tried, mostly, to avoid killing. Scratch that – she _always_ tried to avoid killing. It was the refugees who did most of it, and she wouldn't dare to argue with them that they _shouldn't_. In Ionia she could argue _all_ she wanted with anyone, but in Shurima things went one of two ways; either you did things the _good_ way or the _bad_. Words were of no use when it came to the latter.

It took her another two blinks to see the scavenging leader turning with bulging eyes to look at his now-deserted left flank, and only one more, which was a big feat, to incapacitate the warriors to his right, raising stone walls around them in the matter of instants.

This time, four blinks went by before her foe could process what had just happened, and it took her no other blinks at all to see him turning around and running for his life out of the city. She chuckled to herself, because such a sight never got old.

Felling revitalized after such a joyful feeling, she allowed the trapped evil-doers to decide if they wanted to get out of the city by their own free will or pushed by a wall of stone that wasn't guaranteed to not fall down on them. It would have been only one option any other day but she was feeling _good_ for a change.

Naturally, the course of action was clear to them.

She was watching them stroll out in shame behind their leader _who-was-probably-going-to-get-stabbed-in-his-sleep_ when a cold wind swept across the plaza, sending a shiver down her spine and raising some… _questions_ in her mind. It brought a smell quite different from the dryness of the desert to her nose; humid and green, refreshing. It opened her lungs. It was the smell of a forest, which was a ridiculous enough occurrence itself…if it weren't for the fact that, oddly enough, it was not just the smell of _any_ forest and Taliyah's caramel skin paled a little as she realized that. It was the smell of–

The clapping stirred away the cloud of thoughts from her mind, leaving her dazed and confused and newly annoyed. Who in the name of the _Great Weaver_ could be making such a noise in the middle of a broken city?

It was then when she turned towards the sound.

It was then when her stinging response rammed itself right into her closed throat.

Her master was so very pale and out of place next to the denizens of the desert.

 _Her master was in the desert._

Her master was in the desert _and_ in the same city as her and he was smiling and he had probably seen the fight going down and she was probably blushing–

 _Her master was in the freaking desert_.

Deep breaths.

Yasuo had to admit that he had not expected such an... _immediate_ response. She was standing out there in the open, stiff as a crag, looking at him as if she had seen a ghost. He decided it was probably the right time to approach her.

He walked _slowly_ towards her, _agonizingly_ so, to grant her _even more_ time to process his sudden appearance. But it wasn't enough, apparently. She was still drooling over the sandy ground when he caught up to her. He used her momentary brain-death to ponder once again, not his options but his next words this time. He supposed a simple enough " _Hello_ " would be as effective as anything he could do right then…

 _But_.

… _But_?

What was he thinking about, again?

Surely, it must have been about the girl who now found herself coiled around his form in a hug that was more like a snake-grab than anything else. It occurred to him, that she had missed his dearly.

Taliyah did not realize how much she missed him until he was right in front of her, flesh and all. She went for the hug before the words.

In Shurima, things went one of two ways.

* * *

If you are wondering what chronological, canonical or plot-driven order my stories follow, the answer is _yes._


End file.
